John Patrick Guider

College of Science and Engineering, November 8, 2018

John Patrick Guider received a bachelor degree in electrical engineering from the College of Science and Engineering in 1969 at the University of Minnesota. He went on to work at Honeywell, Sperry Corporation, and then Star Technologies where he served as director of hardware development from 1982-1987. In 1987, he co-founded Tricord Systems, a high-performance server company, which succumbed to business pressures in 2002. However, Guider, along with Phil Soran and Larry Aszmann, co-founded two more companies: XIOtech and Compellent. XIOtech was sold to Seagate Technologies in 2000 for $360 million, and Compellent in 2011 to Dell Inc., for nearly $1 billion. XIOtech and Compellent are known for their software that allows data to be accessed quickly and efficiently from immense arrays of magnetic disk drives that form the physical memory of both the cloud and enterprise storage. Guider is credited with managing the engineering team at all three of the aforementioned companies that were knownfor technical innovation and leadership. Due to his efforts, thousands of local high-quality engineering jobs were created, financial success for many investors transpired, and there was a positive impact on the Minneapolis tech scene. In 2014, the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal selected Guider as the inaugural inductee to the Titans of Technology Hall of Fame. In addition, Guider is a supporter of the BEAUTY study, led by the Mayo Clinic, to develop individualized cancer treatmenttherapies.